Frustrated with Vinly

I can't tell you how many times I've bought new pressings only to have them sound worse than used records I picked up for a few dollars.  For example, I went through 2 bad (lots of surface noise, cleaning on my VPI didn't help) in  pressings of Norah Jones' Come Away With Me from Analogue Productions before getting one that sounded good.  That was from one of the better sources for high quality vinyl. 

I bought a new Madeleine Peyroux album last night and it came in a plain white sleeve and was covered in paper dust from the sleeve.  It played really nice overall, but had 2 or 3 revolutions of really loud pops.  Buying new is not a guarantee you'll get a nice low noise pressing.  A good cleaning before playing is a good idea.  I always put my records in a poly lined inner sleeve and a vinyl outer sleeve.

To the OP, the better your system - turntable, cartridge, phono pre-amp, etc., the quieter your vinyl will play.  Many of the used records I buy play with virtually no audible noise.  As someone else mentioned, this time of year with the dry air, static electricity can be an issue. 

@chakster Don’t assume that because you’re satisfied with less than the best or too lazy to try to improve playback qualities that others are the same as you. Nobody is telling someone new to the hobby that they have to clean their records or take other steps to improve playback but they may choose to do so and it will have positive effects.

I generally don’t clean brand new records before I play them and I buy used records at a store that uses a record cleaner before they put them out for sale. If I buy them somewhere else then I do get out my record cleaner and make sure there is not a bunch of crap on them before I put them on my turntable.

You made a lot of incorrect assumptions.

@chakster Cleaning a record with my VPI 16.5 takes maybe 2 or 3 minutes, really not much more time than it would take to run a brush over the record. 

The VPI is like a turntable.  You put a record on it and you squirt a little cleaning solution on it, spin it around a couple of times with the cleaning brush and then you vacuum it for two revolutions, flip to the other side and repeat.  I don't see spending two or three minutes getting the record clean before I listen for 40 minutes to be a huge ordeal.

Of the 6 or 7 record stores within 45 minutes of me, there's only one that I know of that cleans their used records.  That is where I buy most of my used records, so I don't spend a lot of time cleaning used records.  When I order records from Discogs, I always clean those.  As I mentioned, I don't normally clean new records, but if I open it and it's covered with a bunch of dust from a cheap inner sleeve, it gets cleaned.

I grew up on vinyl and frankly am surprised at how quiet some records can be when played back on a nice system.  The little bit of noise I hear doesn't bother me, but I don't care for loud pops when I'm intently listening to the music.  I'm not sure cleaning does much for those, if it does, that's great. 

In most cases, I don't notice the night and day differences some claim after cleaning a record, but I can tell you there have been a few times when a record didn't seem to be playing well and I cleaned it and it sounded dramatically better.

A while ago I had cut back on how often I used the cleaner.   I was listening to records with my girlfriend one night and the record was sounding noisy and not very dynamic.  She noticed it too and said "Why don't you try cleaning it?".  I said "I bought it from __________ (the store that cleans all their records), so it's probably not going to make any difference, but I'll give it a try".  I wasn't expecting it to help at all.  I cleaned it, and most of the noise went away.  Since then, I've been using the machine more often.

Clean, don't clean... I don't care.  What I don't understand is why you're trying to convince people it's not helpful, or that it's time consuming or hard to do.  Those are all falsehoods.